Highlights of Report Number: 2013-20-128 to the Department of the Treasury, Office of the
Inspector General, Assistant Inspector General for Audit.

IMPACT ON TAXPAYERS

The
IRS collects and maintains a significant
amount of personal and financial information on each taxpayer. The Federal
Information Security Management Act (FISMA) was enacted to strengthen the
security of information and systems within Federal Government agencies. Until the IRS takes steps to fully implement all 11
security program areas covered by FISMA, taxpayer data will remain vulnerable
to inappropriate use, modification, or disclosure, possibly without being
detected.

WHY TIGTA DID THE AUDIT

As part of the FISMA legislation, the Offices of
Inspectors General are required to perform an annual independent evaluation of
each Federal agency’s information security programs and practices. This report
presents the results of TIGTA’s FISMA evaluation of the IRS’s information
security program for Fiscal Year (FY) 2013.

WHAT TIGTA FOUND

Based
on our FY 2013 FISMA evaluation, TIGTA found that nine of 11 security program
areas were generally compliant with the FISMA requirements. Six of the nine
security program areas included all of the program attributes specified by the Department
of Homeland Security’s (DHS) FY 2013 Inspector General Federal Information Security
Management Act Reporting Metrics:

·Continuous Monitoring Management.

·Risk Management.

·Plan of Action and Milestones.

·Contingency Planning.

·Contractor Systems.

·Security Capital Planning.

Three of the nine security program areas,
while generally compliant, were not fully effective due to one program
attribute that was missing or not working as intended:

·Incident
Response and Reporting.

·Security Training.

·Remote Access Management.

However,
two of the 11 security program areas were not compliant with FISMA requirements
and did not meet the level of performance specified by the DHS’s FY 2013
Inspector General Federal Information Security Management Act Reporting Metrics
due to the majority of the DHS-specified attributes being missing or not
working as intended:

·Configuration
Management.

·Identity and Access Management.

WHAT TIGTA RECOMMENDED

TIGTA does not include recommendations as part of
its annual FISMA evaluation and reports only on the level of performance
achieved by the IRS using the guidelines issued by the DHS for the applicable
FISMA evaluation period.